History: 17th to 19th Century Stories of Time Travel
It’s one thing to send your character back into the 17th and 18th centuries, figuring out the ins and outs of time travel. But what about the people living in those times? Did they even think about the idea?
“With us acts are exempt from time, and we
Can crowd eternity into an hour,
Or stretch an hour into an eternity.
We breathe not by a mortal measurement,
But that’s a mystery.”
---Lord Byron, fallen angel Lucifer speaking in Cain, 1821
Any number of science Fiction, Fantasy and Romance writers have penned popular time-travel novels over the years, but no one has utilized time travel to tell their stories more than the writers of Romance. There are popular series such as Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander and Katherine Lowry Logan’s Celtic Brooch books. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Richard Matheson’s Bid Time Return, have been made into movies. Matheson’s book became the 1980 movie Somewhere in Time. Who could forget Jude Deveraux’s A Knight in Shining Armor or Johanna Lindsey’s Until Forever? And of course, there are the many stories of time traveling Highlanders. Even authors better known for contemporary romances such as Suzanne Brockmann, Julie Garwood, and Nora Roberts have written time travel romances.
But what about the people living during the 18th and early 19th centuries? Did they even consider the notion of traveling in time? Doing research online, I ran across this BBC article on that question: “Did Dickens invent time travel?”
The author wrote: “No time machine, no fancy science, but this was the first time-travel jump in modern fiction. In A Christmas Carol (1843), As [Scrooge] says to his third visitation: “Ghost of the Future!” he exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen.”
As the author notes, earlier writers beat Dickens by more than two centuries. What is often called the first time-travel romance, Jacques Guttin’s Epigone, histoire du siècle futur, [The Imitator, a history of the future century] was written in 1659. In Guttin’s time, futuristic romances were frowned upon by the authorities, even before Guttin’s work. It seems there were others writing time travel and descriptions of the future. For the English, describing the future was reserved for the Church’s Apocalypse or astrologers’ forecasts. Around 1622, The Poet and Clergyman John Donne gave his second sermon at Lincoln Inn in which he suggested writing of the future was a form of madness, the proverbial castigation. “He undertakes to write a chronicle of things before they are done, which is an irregular, and a perverse way.”
In England during the late 1620s, news merchants began selling accounts of parliamentary proceedings, and in 1628, the Commons made its first recorded attempt at stopping such publications. Once copy-write law made written works the property of the authors, instead of the government, pamphleteers such as Abel Boyer saw opportunities. In January 1711, Boyer began publishing the Political State of Britain, which included parliamentary debates. Other journals followed, including the Gentleman's Magazine and the London Magazine. London Magazine printed speeches during recess in an attempt to get round Commons rules which prohibited contemporary reporting. In 1738 the House of Commons fought back, declaring that it was a "high indignity and a notorious breach of privilege" to report what was said in the Chamber, even when it was in recess. This 1738 resolution was enforced for the following 33 years.
Never-the-less, by the 1700’s, authors were traveling to make-believe lands and into the future as a way of getting around the law forbidding social polemics and satire. In 1726, Jonathan Swift published his popular political satire, Gulliver’s Travels, escaping the law with fantasy. Following Jonathan Swift’s example, Samuel Johnson started reporting the government debates of Lilliput, a government populated with surprisingly similar politicians and speeches found in British Parliament. The reports were collected and published much later as Samuel Johnson's Parliamentary Reporting.
The Anglican Church continued to support this ban, viewing the only acceptable descriptions of politics and the societal future allowed was to be found in scripture.
One writer took up this satire approach to critique society and government with a story of time travel. In 1733, The Memoirs of the Twentieth Century was published by English minister Samuel Madden. In his novel, a guardian angel travels to the year 1728, bringing letters from the far future: 1997 and 1998. Madden felt a great deal of optimism, imagining a future of scientific discoveries, flying machines and steam power.
He wrote at the beginning of his seven volumes [!]:
“If we consider how few years are past, since we improv’d Astronomy, . . . founded Philosophy on actual experiments, since the compass and needle trac’d out the mariner’s unerring road on the ocean, . . . since war join’d fire with sword, . . . since Physicians found out either new drugs or specificks, or even the secrets of Anatomy, . . . if we reflect, that the small compass of time, which all these great events have happen’d in, seems to promise vast improvements in the growing centuries; it will not appear surprising, and much less absurd, that such discoveries and improvements are allotted to our posterity, in these volumes.”
Unfortunately, Madden’s work was too satirical, having the Catholics in control of the government in the twentieth century. The seven volume work was suppressed by British Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole for the religious and political reasons mentioned above, and most copies were destroyed. Copies are now very rare.[But we can read them now] For several decades, such reactions left most time-travel tales to those writing outside Britain. However, Jonathan Swift did write an acclaimed poem set in the future, “Verses on the death of Dr. Swift” published in 1739.
One futuristic work, The Reign of George VI, 1900-1925, written in 1763, saw the anonymous author claim rather immodestly to using Swift’s methods to disguise political commentary. There was no effort to describe time travel. The work is simply a history of the future heir to the current King, George III, a paragon who conquers France, dominates the world with British ingenuity, generally being the perfect, if aggressive monarch. The work is more jingoistic than satire. Of course, the British government had no problems with this futuristic fiction.
French Louis-Sébastien Mercier described a different future with his time travel L’An 2440. A traveler from the future takes the author to the far future and a utopian Paris. Machines do all the work and government and king have become unnecessary. Mercier felt that his time had made the important discoveries in Natural Philosophy. As the narrator observed to his twenty-fifth century guide: “Everything has its time. Ours was that of innumerable projects; yours is that of implementation.”
Mercier’s tale was translated into English in 1772. Ten years later, Danish Johan Herman Wessel’s play Anno 7603 appeared. Wessel sends people far forward to the 75th century, AD. The visitors find themselves in a society where there are cities on the moon and gender roles are reversed. Two of the travelers, lovers Julie and Leander wonder how the world would be if each other had the better qualities of the opposite gender, The time traveler named Feen takes them forward in time to see the results of raising children in just that way.
“Now my children! You wish to remake each other? Julie, you want your lover transformed into a more tender companion? And you Leander, you would rather that your Julie had a more aggressive bearing?”
And of course, the actual outcome is not what is expected. Adaptions of Mercier’s and Wessl’s works saw a few London stage revivals. Imagine the ‘futuristic’ costumes and scenery created for those plays.
During the Napoleonic wars, Jean-Baptiste Cousin d Grainville’s non-Christian apocalyptic tale, Le dernier homme came out in 1805 and translated into English the next year as The Last Man, or Omegarus and Syderia, A Romance in Futurity. A true romance, it was very popular in France and England and by 1811, it too was seen as a stage play.
A number of the growing stable of novels written during the Regency period had time-travel themes, but the widely read works continued to be written by authors outside of Britain. For instance, in there is American Washington Irving’s 1819 Rip Van Winkle and Russian Alexander Veltman’s 1836 The forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon where The narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff, meets Aristotle, and voyages with Alexander the Great before returning to the 19th century.
The same year as Veltman’s novel, Frenchman Louis Geoffroy wrote Napoleon and The Conquest of the World—1812 to 1832—History of the Universal Monarch. It is an account of Napoleon’s victorious Russian campaign, his successful invasion of England, and the establishment of an universal French monarchy over all of Europe, and later the entire world. It was a Bonapartist’s nostalgic dream where a French utopia was created. Time Travel yarns had spun off a number of alternate histories.
The Irish writer, John Banim published Revelations of the Dead-Alive in 1824. It was reprinted several times, in England in 1845 as London and Its Eccentricities in the Year 2023; or, Revelations of the Dead Alive. Banim corresponded with Washington Irving and like Irving’s van Winkle, sleep is the vehicle gaining the future. However, his hero learns how to fall into a death-like sleep and visit the future as part of the trance. Banim had been fascinated by report at the time of a man who had appeared dead for several days but woke again and seemed to be able to do this at will. Banim used that method to bring his narrator visions of the future.
“In what manner or fashion I was in the future, whether actually or spiritually, I am not competent to declare; but I was in it, not as a dreamer, but seeing, and hearing, and understanding, as previously I had seen, heard, and understood, in my past world.”
This is very similar to the method the hero uses in the Somewhere in Time to travel back to the 1890s.
In 1826, Mary Shelley also wrote an end-of-the-world tale, Last Man, set in 2073. This was four years after the death of her husband, Shelley. Unlike the previous stories of the future, Shelley wrote the story as though the author was describing the present with no time travel involved. . The book describes a future Earth at the time of the late 21st Century, ravaged by an unknown pandemic which quickly sweeps across the world. Unlike Grainville’s futuristic novel and play of the time, Shelley’s book was suppressed, more for its harsh critique of British government than its apocalyptic theme.
Veltman’s time traveling conveyance, a mythical creature, highlights one of the time traveling tropes in the 17th to 19th century: How time was conquered. Time travel was carried out by fairies, spirits, strange sleep, or travelers from the future. We see these same tropes in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, the spirit of Christmas future, and Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a bump on the head.
It wasn’t until the Spaniard Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau in 1887 and H. G. Wells in 1888 that machines are used to travel in time. Science Fiction writers all have depended on machines to reach the past or future. However, few modern Romance writers depend on machines to travel time. Even fewer have the protagonist traveling to or from the future. Johanna Lindsey’s Until Forever is one of the few authors to do both. Like The Last Man, the novel The Time Traveler’s Wife has someone from the future visit the past.
Most time travel Romances employ magic rooms or mysterious runestones, such as Outlander, or watches, brooches and period clothes to send the heroine or hero back to earlier times such as the Celtic Brooch series. Even such old tropes as spirits and bumps on the head have been used. Most modern Romance novels rely on fantasy rather than science to send their characters through time. It is more romantic.
The real difference between earlier time travel stories, current science fiction and modern romance novels is their purpose. For more than two hundred years, from the early 1700s to H.G. Wells and modern science fiction writers still use time travel to examine societal and political issues as well as the dynamics of the science involving temporal transport. Romance writers use time travel to explore relationships and delve into how society can influence love and romance.
So, time travel and exploring the future have been literary tools for nearly six centuries. It wouldn’t be surprising to find Regency heroines and heroes aware of and discussing current stories of time-travel. What is more amazing is that we can read many of these past time-travel stories today for free on the internet.
I have provided links to all the books and authors mentioned. Just click on the brown words.